Pynchon as protagonist--1 of 4

[Joe Allonby]

Pretty cool.

On 11/6/06, Paul Di Filippo <pgdf at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Sent this post yesterday, and it never showed up--trapped in the list's
> size filter, I expect.  So I'm breaking it into parts.
>
>
> Original message follows:
>
>
>
>
>
> Foax--because the subject's been raised, I'm taking the extreme liberty
> of posting my story "World Wars III" to the list.  It stars Our Boy.
>
> It originally appeared in 1992 in the UK zine INTERZONE, and then in my
> collection LOST PAGES.
>
>
> The graph breaks are a little screwed up, because I had to dig up the
> file from an old computer and software.  Hope it's still readable.
>
> Thanks for your indulgence.
>
>
> WORLD WARS III
>
> "Is history personal or statistical?"
> --T. Pynchon.
>
> This happened in Hamburg on the eve of J-Day, the night
> of that now legendary USO triple bill:  the Beatles
> opening for the Supremes and Elvis.  Sort of a chorus of pop
> Valkyries the brass had kindly arranged for all us Jivey
> G.I. Joes and Jolly Jack Tars, before booting us over the
> edge of the steaming crevasse--filled with prop dry ice, or
> leading straight to Hell?--into the gaping maw of the massed
> Warsaw Pact troops, chivvied so recently out of West
> Germany, harried and weary, but far, far from beaten.
> Half the North Atlantic fleet, it seemed, had put in at
> Kiel two days before, for refueling and provisioning.  All
> hands were forbidden shore leave.  Scuttlebutt had it we
> all--or at least my ship, the U.S.S. Rainbow Warrior--would
> soon be
> steaming for Gdansk, to participate in a humongous
> amphibious attack, which--given the Polish defenses around
> their shipyards, led by the already legendary young Major
> Walesa--had about as much chance of success as the
> Republicans had of beating J.F.K. and Stevenson in the next
> elections, or Woody Allen had of playing the romantic lead
> against Sinatra's wife Mia.
> Those were our chances, that is, if the patrolling
> Russkie subs didn't sink us first en route.
> This prospect did not sit well with Pig Bodine and me.
> It wasn't so much that we were scared of dying.  Gee whiz,
> no.  Three years of battle had cured us of that childish
> fear, innoculating us with the universal vaccine known as
> war-anomie.  It was simply that we didn't want to miss the
> big show down Hamburg way.
> "I seen the Beatles before the war," said Pig, "right
> in Hamburg, at the Star Club.  Man, they could rock.  I
> thought they were going somewhere, but I never heard anymore
> about them.  I didn't even know they were still playing
> together."
> Bodine was lying upside down on his bunk, head hanging
> floorward, trying to get a cheap--and the only
> available--high from the rush of blood to his head.
> Physiology recapitulates pharmacology.  Above the bunk hung
> a tattered poster of James Dean and Brigette Bardot in From Russia With
> Love. (The Prez, Fan in Chief of Fleming's novels,
> had an identical one, only autographed, hanging in the Oval
> Office.)
> Pig's enormous hairy stomach was exposed below--or,
> more precisely, above--his dirty shirt; his navel was
> plugged with some disgusting smegma that resembled
> bearing-grease and Crisco.
> Bodine's navel-jam fascinated me at the same time it
> repelled me.  Coming from a white-bread background,
> illustrious Puritan forebears and all that, good school and
> the prospect of a slick entrance into the corporate life at
> Boeing, I had never met anyone quite like Bodine before.  He
> represented some kind of earth-force to me, a troll of
> mythic proportions, liable at any moment to unleash a storm
> of belches and farts capable of toppling trees, accompanied
> by a downpour of sweat and jizm.
> I had known Bodine for ten years now, since I had
> dropped out of Cornell and enlisted in the Navy in '55.
> Peacetime.  It seems so long ago, and so short.  Twenty
> years between the first two, and twenty more till the third.
> Had They been planning it all along, just biding their time
> until the wounds had healed and the people had forgotten,
> until the factories could retool to meet the new specs from
> the R. & D. labs?  Was peace, in fact, like diplomacy,
> merely another means of waging war...?
> Bodine had been my constant companion through all that
> time, even when I had made it briefly into officers'
> territory, before being busted back.  (And that's another
> story entirely, but one also not entirely innocent of the
> Presence of the Pig, Germanic totem of death, he.) We had
> been through a lot of craziness together.  But even so, even
> knowing him as I did, I could not have calculated the vector
> of the madness we were about to embark on now, nor its fatal
> terminus.
> "I think I heard something about them a year or two
> ago," I replied, imagining Pig's mouth as occupying his
> forehead and his eyes his chin.  It barely improved his
> looks.  "The guy named McCarthy--"
> "McCartney," interrupted Pig.
> "Whatever.  He was arrested on a morals charge.  Got
> caught with some jailbait.  And then his buddy, Lemon--"
> "Lennon."
> "All right already with the teacher riff.   Do you
> wanna hear the story or not?  Lennon started shooting heroin
> when the war broke out, and had to spend some time in a
> clinic.  This must be a comeback tour."
> "I could use a little cum back myself," snorted Pig.
> "Left too much in the last port!  Snurg, snarf, hyuck!" This
> last approximating Piggy laughter.  "God, I'm going
> ship-crazy!  I gotta see that show and get laid!  Dig me--do
> you still have that Shore Patrol rig we swiped?"
> "Yeah, why?"
> "Just lissen--"
> And so, several hours later, all tricked out, we
> prepared to breach our own force's
> defenses.
> It was dark, and Benny Yoyodyne, slowest of the slow,
> was on duty guarding the gangway.  I was wearing the S.P.
> armband, harness and nightstick, and had my sidearm strapped
> on.  Pig was in cuffs.
> "Halt!" said Yoyodyne, brandishing his rifle like some
> Annapolis frosh.  "No one's permitted to disembark."
> "It's okay, Benny.  They just need Bodine on shore for
> his court-martial tomorrow."
> Yoyodyne lowered his gun and scratched under his cap.
> "Court-martial?  Gee, I'm sorry to hear that.  What'd he
> do?"
> "You know the soup we had last week?  The one that
> tasted so grungy?  He pissed in it.  They discovered it when
> they saw the distinctive urine corrosion in the kettles. The
> Captain had seconds, and nearly died."
> Yoyodyne turned six shades of green.  "Good Christ!
> what a--a pig!"
>
>
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